Hi all. New Sabayon user here! Switched from Fedora and very pleased with Sabayon so far. Unfortunately, I'm facing a few issues that I've been desperately trying to resolve so your input would be much appreciated.

One of the most painful issues I'm having is getting my Bluetooth headphones to work. As I suppose most of us do, I'm constantly listening to music while I'm busy so I really need these to work properly. I did manage to use them correctly under Fedora (though it was never exactly plug & play) but this time I'm out of luck.

I managed to downloaded the file thanks to others who reported similar issues elsewhere. However, I'm not sure where to actually put the file under Sabayon as there is no /usr/lib/firmware directory.

I've had to play around restaring bluetooth.service and Pulseaudio, reconnecting through bluetoothctl or the bluetooth manager and use the following to get it to use a2dp as it initially would always fail:

I did get it to work by selecting "off" as profile, then repeating the above steps and selecting a2dp_sink. Even so, the result is unstable and audio playback involves lots of skipping. Sometimes the connection is lost so I have to reconnect but then there's no ouput, etc. It's really quite a mess.

Moreover, after a system reboot it no longer works and I need to repeat the tedious process of restarting the Bluetooth service, Pulseaudio, disconnecting and reconnecting my device and tampering with it until it works.If at all.

On a previous Sabayon install (amd64 17.03 GNOME edition, upgraded to 18.04, using Cinnamon) I had to take similar steps. Installing the package linux_firmware and rebooting somehow did the trick and made the firmware error go away. No more skipping, just smooth playback, but I was still forced to do a systemctl restart bluetooth manually for some bizarre reason.

Am I overlooking something? Please note that I'm running the latest available updates of Pulseaudio (11.1) and Bluez (5.48).

Does anyone of you have any suggestions? Thanks!

Last edited by sabaton on Wed Apr 18, 2018 20:07, edited 1 time in total.

Although I'm not sure it was necessary, I installed bluez-firmware and restarted the bluetooth service. I once again attempted to connect to my headphones, but got "Device is unreachable" using the GUI.

I decided to remove the headphones entry, restarted the bluetooth service, then paired the headphones again using bluetoothctl which worked just fine. It managed to connect but then suddenly disconnected for some reason, and when I tried to reconnect the headphones I once again was stuck with "Device is unreachable" even though the headphones were most certainly pairable.

I rebooted and repeated all these steps several times but still the problem persists. Using bluetoothctl leads to the same error. Unless my Linux installation is somehow cursed, I still believe there's a normal solution to this not involving any magic so any input would be very much appreciated.

Apart from that, bluetooth status is just fine and I was finally able to connect my headphones with a2dp. However, output is pretty bad as there's a lot of skipping when listening to mp3 files and eventually the headphones disconnect. I can reconnect but playback remains problematic and eventually it just ends working altogether with the device being unreachable again, unable to connect (etc.) so yet another reboot (etc.) ad infinitium ad nauseam.

Frankly, I'm clueless as to how to proceed now as I've already spent way too much time trying to accomplish something that should take only a minute. Please advise.

Yes. The "config.bin" files are for modifying the BlueTooth firmware, if necessary. They have absolutely no effect on wifi. In addition, the BT part of RTL8723BE does not need such a file. The message has been removed in later versions

.

Maybe it is the kernel version you are using? Do you have the same problems with the 4.14 (LTS) kernel?

joost wrote:You shouldn't been messing around with firmware files like this.
That message got you on the wrong track it seems. (could be wrong here)

Thanks for your reply, Joost.

So basically adding this file doesn't make a difference if I'm reading this right?

joost wrote:Maybe it is the kernel version you are using? Do you have the same problems with the 4.14 (LTS) kernel?

I've been having issues with all of the latest kernels on my ASUS A541UA laptop. When I was running Fedora, upgrading to 4.14 caused my laptop to freeze on boot due to some firmware issue even though I had set the grub parameters to "pci=nomsi pci=noaer" which did work fine under 4.13. This is what I'm talking about. I'm not the only one facing these problems, apparently.

In fact, I didn't even manage to boot from any Sabayon (or Fedora, Manjaro or any other distro for that matter) live CD having a kernel beyond 4.9. My screen would get flooded with these PCI error messages and the laptop would just freeze. Only installing Sabayon 17.03 with kernel 4.9 worked. I'd still get spammed with PCI errors but at least changing the grub parameters mentioned above and rebuilding grub did the trick.

But to get back to Bluetooth, when I did manage to get it to work (with lots of tampering but getting good audio playback) under a previous Sabayon installation (17.03 GNOME edition upgraded to 18.04 with kernel 4.15) I was using GNOME and Cinnamon rather than KDE. I'm wondering if this could make a difference as I suppose these UIs interact in different ways with Pulseaudio and Bluez? I once tested openSUSE with KDE on the same pc and couldn't get bluetooth to work properly either.

Any input would be much appreciated. I've used about all the tricks I have up my sleeve so I have no idea how to proceed from here...

It turns out there's some bug in Pulseaudio. I followed the advice I found here, rebooted the system and now it works for me. Too bad I didn't come across that earlier but at least I've learned a thing or two in the process!